Race, Nation, and Empire in American History

Introduction

JAMES T. CAMPBELL, MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL, & ROBERT G. LEE

There are many ways to introduce a book, especially one that ranges across as much terrain as this one, but let us begin with a gravestone. The stone, which stands in a cemetery in northwest Connecticut, bears the legend, In memory of Henry OBOOKIAH, a native of OWHYHEE. The inscription, dated 1818, credits the young Hawaiian with inspiring the creation of the Foreign Mission School at Cornwall, Connecticut. Few today visit the site. Fewer still realize that there is no body buried beneath the stone. But the story of Opukaha’ia—a tale of unlikely connections and ironic reversals, with echoes reverberating into our own time—has much to teach us about the history of the modern world, and about American history in particular.

Opukaha’ia’s journey commenced in 1808, just thirty years after Captain Cook’s ill-fated visit to Hawaii. He was sixteen years old and an orphan, having lost his family in Kamehameha’s wars of unification. Spying a ship anchored in Kealakekua Bay, he swam out to it. The ship was the Triumph, an American merchantman out of New York, under the command of Caleb Brintnall. Brintnall signed the lad on as a cabin boy, conferring the name by which he would become known to history: Henry Obookiah.¹

Opukaha’ia spent the next year at sea, sailing first to the seal hunting grounds of the Pacific Northwest and thence to Macao and Canton, where the Triumph exchanged its cargo of furs for tea, spices, and silk. The ship then continued west across the Indian Ocean, restocking at Cape Town in South Africa before braving the Atlantic. It finally arrived in New York in late 1809. Most of the crew was paid off there, but Opukaha’ia accompanied Brintnall to his home in New Haven, Connecticut.

Opukaha’ia was clearly of a pious turn of mind—in Hawaii, he had studied to be a kahuna—and he began to attend Christian services in his new home. But with a limited command of English he had little understanding of what he saw and heard. He was sitting on the college steps at Yale crying because he had no means of getting an education when he was befriended by a student, Edwin Dwight, son of Yale’s president, Timothy Dwight. Dwight, who later penned a best-selling memoir of Opukaha’ia’s life, invited the young Hawaiian to live in the Dwight family’s home, where he received religious instruction and learned to read and write. After a year in New Haven, Opukaha’ia moved to nearby Torringford to live with Samuel Mills, a leader of what New Englanders at the time called the Benevolent Empire, a phalanx of religious and reform organizations dedicated to expanding Christ’s kingdom on earth. Though only a few years older than his guest, Mills had already played a central role in the creation of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, the nation’s first overseas mission society, and the American Bible Society, a group dedicated to placing a Bible in every American home. Under the tutelage of Mills and other local ministers, Opukaha’ia blossomed into a pious Christian and a formidable scholar, conversant not only in English but in Latin and Hebrew. By the time of his death, he had produced the first grammar of the Hawaiian language, as well as a translation of the book of Genesis.²

Opukaha’ia’s transformation shaped the character of the emerging American mission movement. While the first European missions relied on white ministers to carry the gospel to foreign lands, the American Board initially embraced the principle of native agency, of training indigenous people to serve as missionaries among their own communities. The Foreign Mission School at Cornwall reflected this approach. Established in 1817, the school was dedicated to preparing the children of heathen nations—not only Hawaiians and Native Americans but also students from as far afield as India and China—for missionary service. Opukaha’ia helped to raise money to build the school, and he was the first student to enroll. But his dream of redeeming his homeland never came to pass. Stricken with typhus, he died on February 17, 1818, at the age of twenty-six. Such was his stature that Lyman Beecher, the nation’s preeminent divine (and father of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe), conducted the funeral. His body was interred in the cemetery at Cornwall, beneath a stone marker celebrating his passage from Pagan priest and Idolater to servant of the Lord.³

Though Opukaha’ia did not live to see it, Christianity did come to Hawaii. Inspired by the young Hawaiian’s life and death, the American Board dispatched the first Christian missionaries to the islands. The company, about twenty people in all, was composed chiefly of white ministers and their wives, though it also included three native Hawaiians, Opukaha’ia’s classmates at Cornwall. (In 1822 the American Board dispatched its first African American missionary to Hawaii, a schoolteacher and former slave named Betsy Stockton.) The missionaries anticipated opposition, but on arriving in Hawaii they learned that Kamehameha had died and that the kapu system, the elaborate system of religious law that undergirded the traditional order, had been abolished, clearing the way for the rapid spread of Christianity on the islands. For the mission’s sponsors, the passing of the old order was a proof of God’s favor, the final element in a providential plan that began when a young orphan swam out to an American ship in Kealakekua Bay.⁴

To contemporaries, the life of Henry Obookiah offered a reassuring parable of enlightenment and progress beneath a Christian cross and the American flag. Yet for the historian, it is a story laced with ironies and unexpected connections. Samuel Mills, for example, was not only Opukaha’ia’s benefactor but also a founder of the American Colonization Society, an institution dedicated to removing free Africans and African Americans from the nation’s shores. Whatever his beliefs in the young Hawaiian’s potential, Mills refused to believe that black people could ever be absorbed as citizens in an American republic. In 1817 he sailed to West Africa to locate a site for an African American colony, what would later become Liberia. Stricken with a fever, presumably malaria, he died on the return voyage, just a month after Opukaha’ia.⁵

The Foreign Mission School at Cornwall also met an early demise, a victim of a different kind of fever: racism. The controversy that scuttled the school centered on a pair of Cherokee students from Georgia, Elias Boudinot and John Ridge. The two were cousins and members of a prominent civilized family among the Cherokee, a family that had embraced Christianity, individual land tenure, and commercial agriculture. (The family’s loyalties were registered in their adopted names: Major Ridge, John’s father and the family patriarch, acquired his forename serving alongside Andrew Jackson in the Seminole War, while Boudinot, born Buck Watie, bore the name of the president of the American Bible Society.) The young men were precisely the kind of students for whom the Foreign Mission School had been founded, but they committed a cardinal sin: they fell in love with white women. In 1824 Ridge married Sarah Northrup, the daughter of the school’s steward, scandalizing the local community. In marrying Ridge, the local newspaper opined, Northrup had "made herself a squaw, and connected her race to a race of Indians." Two years later, Boudinot also married a white woman, Harriet Gold, daughter of a local physician, provoking another outcry, highlighted by a mob’s burning an effigy of the bride. The scandal was too much for the leaders of the American Board of Missionaries, who closed the school.⁶

The episode had a grim sequel. Undeterred by their encounter with American racism, Boudinot and Ridge remained leading advocates of Cherokee acculturation and Western-style progress. Boudinot drafted a republican constitution for the Cherokee nation and worked on the first Cherokee translation of the New Testament. In 1826 he founded the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in U.S. history. With pressure on Cherokee lands mounting after the 1830 Indian Removal Act, Boudinot initially took a defiant stand, insisting on the Cherokees’ right to live on land which God gave them . . . surrounded by guarantees which this Republic has voluntarily made for their protection. But as removal became inevitable, he changed tack, advocating negotiation and compromise. In 1835 Boudinot, John Ridge, and Major Ridge signed the Treaty of Echota, ceding Cherokee lands to the United States in exchange for land west of the Mississippi. Though the three had no authority to negotiate on behalf of the tribe (most of whose leaders and members staunchly opposed removal), the treaty was quickly ratified by the U.S. Senate, and the Cherokee were compelled to leave their homes. Thus began the Trail of Tears, on which a third of the Cherokee nation perished.⁷

Boudinot and the Ridges survived the westward journey, settling in Oklahoma. But in signing the treaty they had antagonized most Cherokee people. They had also violated tribal law, which prohibited the sale or transfer of land to non-Cherokees under penalty of death. In 1839 Boudinot was assassinated by a band of Cherokee men; fittingly, the murder occurred as he was walking to the local mission church. John and Major Ridge were killed the same day.

The American mission in Hawaii took the most ironical turn of all. Shielded from the upheavals on the mainland, the mission survived and even prospered, as indigenous Hawaiians, loosed from the kapu system and reeling from waves of newly introduced diseases, sought the solace of the new religion. But the years also brought a distinct hardening of racial lines within the mission. By the coming of the Civil War, the spirit of Christian universalism and democratic optimism in which the enterprise had been launched had all but evaporated, taking the commitment to native agency with it. Authority in the mission rested in the hands of whites, with native Hawaiians cast in the role of perpetual minors.

The changes in the mission were associated with Richard Armstrong, a missionary who arrived in Hawaii in 1831 and served as minister of public instruction on the islands from 1840 until his death in 1860. For Armstrong, Polynesian people stood far behind whites in the ranks of civilization. While sweet and tractable, they were also improvident, indolent, and emotional, requiring generations of white tutelage before they could safely be entrusted with the responsibilities of self-government. This assessment was reflected in the curriculum that Armstrong installed on the islands, a system that contemporaries called industrial education. First developed as a pedagogy for the British working class, industrial education eschewed subjects like Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—subjects in which Opukaha’ia had excelled—in favor of courses in brick making, carpentry, agriculture, and other practical pursuits. Such instruction, the argument ran, served not only to equip students with useful skills but also to reform their characters, instilling those habits of industry—selfdiscipline, regularity, a mind to work—that savage races were presumed to lack.⁸

Armstrong’s legacy was carried forward by his son, Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Born on a Maui mission in 1839, the younger Armstrong left Hawaii in 1860, the year of his father’s death, to enroll at Williams College. After service in the Civil War, he served as agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Hampton, Virginia. Not surprisingly, Armstrong saw his charges through the prism of his upbringing in Hawaii. Though emerging from slavery rather than savagery, African Americans were also a backward race, without experience of self-government or self-directed labor; like Hawaiians, they would require white tutelage as they confronted the challenges of modern civilization. Significantly, Armstrong’s first act on arriving at Hampton was to divest local blacks of farms that they had been given by his predecessor, restoring the land to its former white owners. It put them at the bottom of the ladder, he later explained; it is not a bad thing for anyone to touch bottom early, if there is a good solid foundation under him and then climb from that.⁹

Armstrong is best known to history as the founder of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which opened in 1868. Underwritten by the American Missionary Association (an organization representing the same New England Congregationalists who had founded the Foreign Mission School at Cornwall half a century before), Hampton quickly became the nation’s premier educational institution for African Americans (and, after 1878, for Native Americans and native Hawaiians as well). The regime at the school followed the industrial formula that Armstrong’s father had developed in Hawaii. Students paid for their own educations by working in the institute’s fields, workshops, and kitchens, a system that reduced the school’s costs while instilling wholesome lessons about responsibility and work. (Fears that black people would revert to idleness once the compulsion of the lash was withdrawn were ubiquitous in the postbellum era.) Though most graduates were destined to careers as teachers, all students were required to study at least one manual trade. Moral philosophy, ancient and modern languages, history—the cornerstones of the classical curriculum still prevailing in white schools—found no place at Hampton. Nor did politics. For Armstrong, political participation was a trap, diverting the freedpeople from the true path of racial development.¹⁰

Samuel Chapman Armstrong introduced industrial education to the postbellum South; his protege Booker T. Washington broadcast it to the world. Born a slave, Washington graduated from Hampton in 1875 and later returned to serve as Armstrong’s assistant. In 1881 he opened a school of his own, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, where he quickly earned acclaim for his conservative, sensible approach to racial matters. Washington’s apotheosis came in 1895, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Decrying agitation of questions of social equality as the supremest folly, the Tuskegeean gave an apparent black seal of approval to the Jim Crow regime settling over the South. In all things purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, he famously declared, yet one as the hand in all things related to our mutual progress.¹¹

The Atlanta Compromise speech served not only to establish Washington’s status as the representative black political leader in the United States; it also made him an international celebrity. Educators and politicians from around the world found their way to Tuskegee, seeking solutions to their own nations’ racial and educational predicaments. Up from Slavery, Washington’s 1901 autobiography, quickly became the most widely translated book in American history, with editions in Turkish, Zulu, and everything in between. Needless to say, different readers drew different conclusions about the significance of Washington’s life. While many African Americans fastened on themes of autonomy and self-help—Marcus Garvey famously declared his dream of becoming the Booker T. Washington of Jamaica—whites focused on industrial education, a system that had seemingly accomplished the great desideratum of the postslavery Western world: enhancing black productivity and usefulness without awakening unhealthy aspirations for social and political equality. In the early years of the century, Washington worked with German imperial officials to create a short-lived mini-Tuskegee in Togo. British officials in Rhodesia and South Africa, where the discovery of diamonds and gold had created an insatiable demand for cheap, docile black labor, corresponded regularly with the Tuskegeean and even invited him to come and overhaul their systems of native education. One can only wonder what Opukaha’ia might have made of this unlikely legacy.¹²

By conventional historical standards, Opukaha’ia is not a significant historical figure. You will not find him in your textbook, except perhaps in Hawaii. Yet his story poses fundamental challenges to historians of the United States. Over the last generation, subjects like African American, Asian American, and Latino/a studies have entrenched themselves in university faculties and curricula, yet they are still typically treated as marginal or supplemental—subjects for the shaded sidebars of high school history texts. Opukaha’ia’s story challenges this practice. Not only does it illuminate the experience of previously neglected groups—indigenous Hawaiians, Cherokees, southern freedpeople—but it also connects those experiences to one another and to the broader history of the nation.

Opukaha’ia’s journey also challenges our understanding of historical boundaries, in two distinct but related ways. To trace his travels is to discover a universe in motion, a world in which people, commodities, and cultural forms ranged across national borders, creating novel connections and exchanges—Chinese silks for American sealskins, a republican constitution for the Cherokee, a Togolese Tuskegee. Globalization may be a recent coinage, but the processes it describes have gone on for centuries. Yet Opukaha’ia’s story also reveals the erection of new kinds of boundaries, the emergence of new systems of racial classification and exclusion. Thus the Foreign Mission School at Cornwall ended with a white woman burned in effigy for the sin of marrying an Indian, while the Christian universalism and democratic optimism of the early Hawaii mission transmogrified, over the course of two generations, into a global regime for reducing the world’s darker people to a state of permanent vassalage.

Race, Nation, and Empire in American History is a response to these challenges. At the most basic level, the book seeks to recapture the worlds of men and women like Opukaha’ia, to illuminate lives and struggles that too often slip through the cracks of more mainstream historical narratives. But it is also an attempt to rechart the historical mainstream. Opukaha’ia may be an obscure figure, but the processes that his story reveals are anything but minor: the global expansion of American merchant capital; the rise of an evangelical Christian mission movement; the dispossession (and subsequent erasure) of indigenous people; the birth of new identities, grounded in race, religion, gender, and nation, and the tensions within and between them; the endless struggles over the place of darker-skinned peoples in a nation that continues fundamentally to imagine itself as white. All of these themes resurface, in different contexts and combinations, in the essays that follow.

The book is also a meditation on boundaries. As Opukaha’ia’s life suggests—and as a growing body of works in American history and American studies confirms—the United States is and has long been a robustly global nation, whose politics, economy, and culture have both shaped and been shaped by developments in the wider world. The essays that follow are full of transnational connections and cross-pollinations, of people popping up in unexpected places. Yet they are also stories of people being put, quite literally, in their place, of bitter struggles over the boundaries of race and nation. One of the central claims of this book is that these two seemingly contradictory processes, of boundary crossing and boundary making, are and have always been intertwined.¹³

One of the morals of Opukaha’ia’s story—and, again, one of the main contentions of this book—is that boundary disputes are not new. On the contrary, they are as old as the republic. It is by now a truism that the Declaration of Independence, with its soaring invocations of human equality and unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, was written by a slaveholder—a man who insisted not only on black people’s inherent incapacity for citizenship but also on the impossibility of blacks and whites living together as free people in a common society. The struggle over boundaries was also exhibited in the 1790 Naturalization Act, a law that revolutionized modern understandings of citizenship by creating a procedure for naturalizing aliens as Americans but that also reserved the process for free white persons. Passed by the very first American Congress and signed into law by George Washington, the Naturalization Act represents the wellspring of much of subsequent American history, including many of the problems and processes discussed in this book: the coming tides of European immigration, the reduction of native peoples to the status of domestic dependents, Chinese exclusion, and the abiding aversion of most Americans to foreign entanglements, even as they seek to broadcast their values, cultural forms, and commodities across the globe.

While such issues are not new, they possess particular salience today. By grim coincidence, the origins of this book trace to September 2001, as the editors entered a conversation about the direction of the ethnic studies program at our university. A few days later, the twin towers of the World Trade Center—symbol of both the global economic preeminence of the United States and of the complex fissures of race, ethnicity, and class within it—fell. The years since have brought a presidential declaration of a war on terror and a pair of shooting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which have now devolved into longrunning counterinsurgency wars. We have also witnessed, as in previous eras of war and popular alarm, an assault on civil liberties at home, including detention without trial, suspension of the right of habeas corpus, and revelations of government wiretaps without the formality of warrants. We have had reports of a global network of secret American prison camps and been treated to gruesome photographs of the systematic humiliation and torture of Muslim detainees by American soldiers—photographs that evoke other images in the American archives, complete with bound bodies and leering bystanders. We have seen renewed debates over immigration control and the propriety of the racial profiling of dark-skinned travelers, as well as a sometimes rancorous debate over America’s role in the world, including the question of whether the United States is or ought to be an empire. Different readers will doubtless have different opinions about these matters. Some may object to the way in which we have represented them here. But all should agree that the current situation has invested the questions examined in this book with new interest and urgency.

The essays that follow are arranged in five sections. Part I, Who’s Who: American Encounters with Race, examines the history of efforts to sort and classify America’s diverse inhabitants. Joanne Pope Melish traces the emergence and transformation of the native as a racial category in New England in the colonial and early national periods, revealing the locally diverse, confusing, and sometimes contradictory conceptions that emerged as New Englanders tried to make sense of a complex and fluid reality. Vernon Williams reexamines the career of Franz Boas, a German Jewish immigrant and child of the European revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century, whose academic assault on prevailing ideas of fixed racial inheritance transformed American understandings of human variety. The section closes with George Hutchinson’s essay on novelist Nella Larsen, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most enigmatic and misunderstood personalities. Moving between Larsen’s own time and representations of her in scholarly work today, Hutchinson offers a meditation on Americans’ persistent difficulty in imagining a subject that is at once white and black, European and American. Taken together, the three essays illuminate both the global scope and the local specificities of race making, while reminding us of the essential arbitrariness of any system of racial classification.

The essays in Part II, Ironies of Empire, offer distinctly different perspectives on the global expansion of American cultural, economic, and political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eric Love examines a familiar problem among historians of American empire—the annexation of Hawaii—but arrives at an unfamiliar conclusion. While most scholars have linked the onset of formal imperialism in the late nineteenth century with the era’s increasingly rigid racial ideas, Love suggests that ideologies like Social Darwinism and scientific racism could also be impediments to empire, with at least some racists recoiling from the idea of trying to absorb hordes of unassimilable, dark-skinned folk into the body politic. Matthew Frye Jacobson examines the complex cultural, ideological, and political reverberations set off by two of the defining movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the quest for overseas markets for American manufactures and the surge in European immigration. To put the matter too bluntly, Jacobson reminds us that the debate over America’s place in the world unfolded alongside a debate over the place of the world’s people in the United States. Finally, James Campbell examines America’s rise to globalism from the standpoint of South Africa—a country in which the imprint of the United States has been especially significant. He shows how a variety of American goods, including not only commodities but also cultural forms, industrial techniques, and racial ideologies, found their way to South Africa, and how they were in turn taken up and refashioned by different groups of South Africans.

As its title suggests, the third section of the book, Engendering Race, Nation, and Empire, examines the complex interrelationship between processes of race making, nation building, and imperial expansion through the prism of gender. Louise Newman examines the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century but complicates the story in two different ways: first, by setting the rise of overseas empire in the context of a longer history of American encounters with backward people; and second, by focusing on debates over the status and role of women. In a masterpiece of historical synthesis, Newman shows how ideas about the proper status of women provided a crucial ideological underpinning of empire, offering a justification for forcibly intervening in the lives of people—Native Americans, southern freedpeople, Filipinos—whose domestic affairs did not conform to civilized norms. Matt Garcia also examines social conflict through a gendered lens, but he focuses not on questions of womanhood but rather on struggles over the meaning of manhood. Specifically, he explores intraethnic conflict between Mexican American immigrants and Mexican bracero workers in the colonias of Southern California in the decades after World War II, showing how differences in experience and class position came to play themselves out on the terrain of masculinity. The section closes with Natasha Zaretsky’s essay on the strange career of Delia Alvarez, whose status as the sister of the longest-held American prisoner of war in North Vietnam placed her at the complex conjunction of the Chicano movement, the women’s movement, and the antiwar movement.

As the example of Opukaha’ia shows, life history represents one of the most promising vehicles for escaping the confines of narrowly national histories. The essays in Part IV, Crossings, trace the experiences of three peripatetic American women whose travels not only carried them beyond the borders of the United States but also challenged assumed borders of individual, racial, and national identity. Matthew Pratt Guterl unfolds the story of Eliza McHatton, a southern slaveholder displaced by the Civil War, as she ventured from Louisiana to Mexico and eventually to Cuba, seeking to recover her lost life in the Old South. Historian Kevin Gaines examines the experience of African American civil rights lawyer Pauli Murray, as she struggled to reconcile the demands of racial loyalty and liberal universalism, as well as her own conflicted racial, national, and sexual identities, in the cauldron of decolonizing Africa. In the final essay in the section, Ruth Feldstein excavates a transnational black radical politics through a close reading of the life and work of jazz singer Nina Simone.

End Times, the book’s final section, offers a trio of reflections on the nation’s recent past and near future, looking at struggles over the meaning of racial, cultural, and religious difference in a world defined by increasing global economic integration and by deepening global conflict. Prema Kurien turns the problem inside out by focusing on the predicament of Indian American scholars working in American universities. As Kurien shows, Indian American scholars working in such fields as postcolonial and subaltern studies have offered powerful critiques of Western (and specifically American) imperialism, only to find themselves assailed by conservative Indian American groups deriding them as captives of the West and demanding a return to traditional Hindu forms of knowledge and belief. Robert Lee offers a comparative exploration of the Yellow Peril of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and fears of a militant brown Islam in American culture today, exposing a host of unexpected parallels and connections. The section closes with an essay by Melani McAlister examining the alleged clash of civilizations between the United States and the Islamic world from the perspective of Christian evangelicals—a community, she argues, that is far more variegated in its political attitudes than media stereotypes might suggest. Though the three essays offer very different understandings of the nation’s present predicament, all highlight common themes and problems, from the power of prophetic belief to the role of modern media in the creation and perpetuation of racial, religious, and national chauvinism. They also remind us, yet again, of the complex, continuing entanglements between race, nation, and empire, between the assertion of American power abroad and struggles over identity and difference within America’s borders.

All of which brings us back to where we began, to the story of Opukaha’ia and a weathered gravestone in a remote corner of northwestern Connecticut—a stone memorializing the life and death of Henry OBOOKIAH, a native of OWHYHEE. No body lay beneath the marker. After long years of obscurity, Opukaha’ia experienced something of a historical revival in the late twentieth century. A series of developments within Hawaiian society—the rise of a Hawaiian sovereignty movement, the continuing spread of evangelical Christianity on the islands, controversy over indigenous land claims and over the propriety and legality of separate schools for native Hawaiian children—sparked new interest in Opukaha’ia’s life and legacy. Not surprisingly, different groups interpreted that life and legacy in different ways, but most agreed that the final resting place of Hawaii’s first Christian convert was properly on the islands. In 1993 his body was exhumed and returned to Hawaii, where it was reinterred in Kahikolu cemetery in Napoopoo, on the big island of Hawaii. Located on the grounds of an early American Board mission church, the grave is just a few hundred yards from Kealakekua Bay, where Opukaha’ia made his original plunge and where tourists now frolic. It is a long way from Kealakekua Bay to Cornwall, Connecticut, though perhaps not as far as we once imagined.

NOTES

1. See E. W. Dwight, Memoirs of Henry Obookiah: A Native of Owhyhee and a Member of the Foreign Mission School, Who Died at Cornwall, Connecticut, February 17,1818, Aged 26 Years (New Haven, Conn.: Office of the Religious Intelligencer, 1818).

2. Ibid., 5–7; Henry Obookiah, A Short Elementary Grammar of the Owhihe Language (1818; Honolulu: Manoa Press, 1993). On Mills, see Samuel J. Mills, Communications Relative to the Progress of the Bible Societies in the United States (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Bible Society, 1813); and Mills and Daniel Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour through the Portion of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegheny Mountains (Andover, Mass.: Flagg and Gould, 1815).

3. Lyman Beecher, A Sermon Delivered at the Funeral of Henry Obookiah, a Native of Owhyhee, and a Member of the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, February 18, 1818 (Elizabeth-Town, N.J.: Edson Hart, 1819). On the founding of the Foreign Mission School, see Extracts from the Report of the Agents of the Foreign Mission School to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, September, 1817 (Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Co., 1818); Joseph Harvey, The Banner of Christ Set Up: A Sermon Delivered at the Inauguration of the Reverend Harmon Daggett as Principal of the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, May 6, 1818 (Elizabeth-Town, N.J.: Edson Hart, 1819); and Harmon Daggett, An Inaugural Address, Delivered at the Opening of the Foreign Mission School, May 6, 1818 (Elizabeth-Town, N.J.: Edson Hart, 1819).

4. On the origins and history of the Hawaiian mission, see Bradford Smith, Yankees in Paradise: The New England Impact on Hawaii (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1956); and Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989). For contemporary accounts, see Hiram Bingham, A Residence of 21 Years in the Sandwich Islands; or, The Civil, Religious, and Political History of Those Islands, Comprising a Particular View of the Missionary Operations Connected with the Introduction and Progress of Christianity and Civilization among the Hawaiian People (Hartford, Conn.: Hezekiah Huntington, 1847); and Rufus Anderson, Heathen Nation Evangelized: History of the Sandwich Islands Mission (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1870).

5. Mills’s involvement with the American Colonization Society, including his ill-fated journey to West Africa, is discussed in Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

6. Theda Perdue, Elias Boudinot, in Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life from the Paleo-Indians to the Present, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 81. See also Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People (2d ed.; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986); and Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton, eds., Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939).

7. Perdue, Elias Boudinot, 81. Boudinot’s editorials are excerpted in Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995).

8. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 38–42.

9. Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868–1915 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 7.

10. On the origins of the Hampton model of industrial education, see Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 33–78. See also Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Education for Life (Hampton, Va.: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 1913); and Francis Greenwood Peabody, Education for Life: The Story of Hampton Institute, Told in Connection with the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of the School (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1918).

11. The complete text of Washington’s Atlanta speech, as well as a digest of contemporary responses to it, is included in Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

12. See Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington and the White Man’s Burden, American Historical Review 71 (January 1966): 441–67. On the South African case, see James T. Campbell, Models and Metaphors: Industrial Education in the United States and South Africa, in Comparative Perspectives on South Africa, ed. Ran Greenstein (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 90–134.

13. For a sampling of recent efforts to recast American history and American studies in transnational perspective, see Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May, eds., "Here, There, and Everywhere": The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000).

PART I: Who’s Who: American Encounters with Race

The Racial Vernacular

Contesting the Black/White Binary in Nineteenth-Century Rhode Island

JOANNE POPE MELISH

On August 8, 1843, at the end of a letter to Elisha Reynolds Potter Jr., of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, concerning unrelated matters, Governor John Brown Francis segued to an upcoming celebration of the Narragansett Indians, to be held in Potter’s hometown in the southern section of the state: What is this great Indian powow,’ he asked. I thought the Tribe were Negroes.¹ More than a century and a quarter later, on February 22, 1970, the feature story in the Sunday magazine section of the Providence Journal-Bulletin, the major daily newspaper serving the state of Rhode Island, made essentially the same point. A bold, forty-eight-point footer running across two facing pages of the article read, When is an Indian not an Indian? In South County, it’s when he’s a Negro.²

These two quotations illustrate the persistent characterization of the Narragansett Indians and other New England tribes as black beginning in the early nineteenth century, a development understood to be part of a rapid progression toward the relatively rigid black/white racial binary characteristic of the United States, often contrasted to the complex and fluid racial framework operative in Latin America. The movement toward a black/white binary occurred as a new racial order emerged in the northern United States after the American Revolution in response to resultant economic and social dislocations, the gradual emancipation of slaves, the assertion of new state authority over indigenous tribes, and the influx of increasing numbers of new immigrants drawn to the Northeast by the first phase of American industrialization. Under these conditions, categories of difference that previously had supported a hierarchy of statuses (for example, slave, bond servant, ward, citizen, slave owner), and thus had been understood to be mutable and shaped by environment and culture, hardened into a fixed framework of innate and permanent raced social identities coded by physiognomy and descent. Terms used in public records to characterize persons of indigenous descent—Indian, mustee, and molatto—gradually were replaced by Negro, black, and coloured. The word Indian became more or less reserved to describe a people imagined to be close to extinction as a result of disease, defeat, and the race mixing and cultural conflation that the new terms implied.

Most of the pressure to consolidate differences into a black/white dyad came from the state in an attempt to turn the heterogeneous into the manageable, in David Theo Goldberg’s words.³ But the relentless progression to the binary was not uncontested. It met considerable resistance, especially but not exclusively on the part of native people themselves. Contradictory positions were articulated even at the state level. A range of racialized identities was negotiated and deployed in resistance to or disregard of the binary. Local public officials and the common citizenry purposefully chose negro, black, and coloured as distinct terms with different meanings to account for an increasingly complex variety of differences in origins (in terms of both place and status), lineage, and culture. People of wholly or partly native descent continued to describe themselves as Indian, an assertion of continuity of cultural practice, tradition, and, since mixed-race children were usually the offspring of Indian women and African men, their matrilineality.

Racial designations were locally inflected and relational, indexed by local readings of a host of different factors—cultural conventions, economic relationships, gender conventions, status relationships, national identities, citizenship status, religion, and perhaps others. Place and social context could give similarly descended people variant racialized identities; very specific circumstances could produce different racial identities for closely related people and could change either an official or a colloquial racial identity of the same person. Well into the antebellum period, an increasingly rigid set of abstract racial categories defined by the state sat uneasily upon a much more complex and contradictory set of racial characterizations in practice, reflecting not only local meanings of distinctions based on color, descent, and class among long-settled U.S. populations but also attempts to coin racialized social identities for a shifting matrix of new immigrants. Such a set of locally inflected, negotiated, complex, contradictory, and polymorphous racial characterizations may be called a racial vernacular. People of color shaped the racial vernacular, deploying specific characterizations to establish sovereignty, support legal rights and claims, evade authority, gain sympathy, or appeal to patriotism. Anglo-American local officials, familiar in most cases with the actual lineage of their neighbors whose lives they regulated, classified them by terms that would accommodate their increasingly complex family trees yet place them in some sort of orderly (and implicitly hierarchical) matrix, and then applied the same vocabulary, sometimes uncertainly (as in molatto or mustee), to fit transient strangers into the matrix.

Rhode Island offers a useful case study of the evolution of this fluid and evolving language of racial difference in the nineteenth century, its collapse into a binary from which the Indians had officially disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century, and the impact of its legacy on twentieth-century struggles to reconstruct, repair, and celebrate the memory of slavery and emancipation in Rhode Island.

The context for these developments was the 1636 settlement by the English of a region they called Rhode Island, whose native population was Narragansett, and the almost immediate importation of enslaved Africans. Africans and Indians were located quite differently in the English colonial order. Virtually all Africans were enslaved, and the concern of English authorities was at the outset and remained their control. The situation with respect to the Narragansett was different. Although many Narragansetts and other Indians were also enslaved (or bound for long terms), the principal concern of English authorities in dealing with the Narragansett as a nation, especially after the defeat and massacre of the tribe near the end of King Philip’s War, was their management and protection, through formal state guardianship (out of self-interest, certainly, but also to stem the rapid depletion of their tribal lands in ill-conceived land transactions).

A particular racial vernacular evolved in colonial Rhode Island in this context. The first step, of course, was the collapse of specificity in the popular identification of ethnic groups: Bambara or Igbo into Negroes or Africans, and Narragansetts into Indians.⁴ The particular ethnicity or place of origin of individual slaves, while sometimes a matter of initial interest to slaveholders in New England as elsewhere on the theory that some ethnic groups made better slaves than others, seldom remained a salient feature of an individual slave’s identity except when expressed in a personal name such as Gambia. As specific ethnicity became something of an abstraction, the term African itself became for African slaves and slaveholders an ethnic term; for slaves, and later free persons of African descent, it also became a term expressing fictive national origin. The currency, through international trade, of Spanish and Portuguese terms, often in corrupted forms, such as Negro, Mollatto, and Mustee, along with black in English and African, provided the first glossary of classification.

By 1700, whites in Rhode Island were referring to the Narragansetts as simply Indian in most domestic contexts, local government records, private correspondence, and colony/state actions seeking to control social behavior; the popularity of the generic Indian was facilitated by the presence of some Pequots, Niantics, Wampanoags, Nipmucs, and other Indian peoples in Rhode Island communities. In official contexts, however—in land transfers, discussions of alliances and hostilities, and most legislation directly concerned with the tribe per se—Narragansetts remained Narragansett for the next 150 years.⁵ In these contexts, Narragansett functioned as a national identity, within which remained encoded the notion of native connection to the land.

Although it is possible that the indigenous peoples of southern Rhode Island and west and central Africa encountered each other as Narragansetts and Gambians, nonetheless, as David Eltis has pointed out, the effect of the slave trade was to encourage an elementary pan-Africanism among slaves of different African ethnicity;⁶ to the Africans, Narragansett would have no particular meaning. Therefore, it was probably as generic Indians and Africans that the social lives of the two groups were policed and recorded by Europeans as they began to labor and live together in the Rhode Island countryside.

The immediate context for reshaping the language of classification of Indians and Africans by Europeans was their concurrent labor. Before 1750, nearly all Africans and Narragansett Indians who labored in white households were slaves or bond servants. Pequot and Narragansett captives had been sold as slaves or bound for long terms at the end of the Pequot and King Philip’s Wars, many out of the colony but some, especially women and children, within New England.⁷ The sale of Indian land had also forced many Narragansetts into service. As Tobias Shattock, a Narragansett, wrote to Colonel Joseph Hazard in 1768, We have been threatened with ruin for a course of Years, by having our Land Sold from us; that we have greatly fear’d we must come into Bondage with our Children. Many had indeed bound their children and occasionally themselves to labor in white households.⁸

Africans and Indians in Rhode Island labored side by side. The 1774 Rhode Island census reveals that of the 17 percent of white Rhode Island families (1,503 households), spread across all but three of the twenty-eight cities and towns, that had slaves and/or bound servants of color in their households, nearly one-quarter employed Indians, and nearly half of those (46 percent) employed Indians and Africans together. By the eve of the American Revolution, an extensive subculture of family slaves and bound servants of color, many working together in fields and dairies, many more socializing together, had developed in Rhode Island, especially in King’s County (later Washington County), where sizable plantations producing foodstuffs and horses for export to the West Indies required large numbers of workers.

Inevitably, contiguity in bondage resulted in some intermarriage, and a plurality of terms with reference to these people and their offspring—Indian, black, negro, mollato, and mustee—began to appear at the local level, in the records of town officials and in account books and diaries. The colony, on the other hand, maintained three classifications for Rhode Island residents: white, Indian and black, resisting the popular plural vernacular but not yet imposing a black/white binary either.

As of 1774, hypodescent had not yet become a guiding principle in the formation of protoracial ideology with respect to African/Indian intermixtures. The 1774 Rhode Island census lists six independent families of color that have some members enumerated in the Indian column and others in the black column. Of the 188 independent Indian families listed, several have heads of household with the names Sippeo, Cuff, Caesar, Quom, and Sambo—all classical and West African day names common to African slaves. Among fifty-five independent black families listed, one has a head of household named Mustee.⁹ These listings demonstrate that Sippeo, Caesar, and Cuff were considered Indians even with African heritage; in 1774 the persistence of Indian cultural practices or language use apparently still outweighed considerations of status, phenotype, and so forth. (We know that as late as 1753 some Narragansetts still spoke no English, as evidenced by a deposition identified as having been made by Sarah Tom an Indian Woman of Charleston in Kings County, Mr. George Babcock being the Interpreter.)¹⁰

But, by the late eighteenth century, the meaning of the terms black and Negro in English usage was changing. In one usage, black was becoming a physical descriptor, while Negro was at least sometimes used to convey the notion of mixed descent with African heritage predominating, often with a latent implication of enslaved origins as well. Hence, referring back to Rhode Island at the time of an earlier census in 1755, Ezra Stiles observed in 1773 that the blacks were chiefly Negroes, excepting in the country of King’s County, where are the Remains of the Narragansett Indians.¹¹ This wording suggests that, in that Rhode Island county, some of the blacks were not Negroes, but Indians.

Another important implication of the 1774 census listings is that many Indian families listed by head of household apparently were living independently among whites, along with free African-descended families, as relatively assimilated (in English eyes) elements of the community, no longer living in the native manner. Quite likely, they had first lived in the households of whites as servants and slaves, and then had formed independent households, some of whose members perhaps still labored for local white families.

The census reports 494 Indians living in 106 independent families in Charlestown on parcels of land individually owned or held in common by the tribe. These, too, included some individuals of full or partial African descent. In 1765 Simeon Matthews petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly for relief under the law excluding Indians living as members of the tribe from taxation, stating that he "acknowledges himself to be an Indian has taken a Wife that is part Indian & part Negro & live together after the manner of the Indians. Simeon Matthews appears as Simeon Marthers in the census, the head of a household consisting of a male and a female over sixteen and a male and female under sixteen, all listed as Indians."¹²

In the years that followed the Revolution, however, officials at the state and federal level began to document Indian disappearance as a consequence of race mixing. In December 1831, Dan King, chair of a committee appointed by the Rhode Island General Assembly to investigate the condition of the Narragansett tribe of Indians, reported, The once powerful nation of the Narragansetts is found to be rapidly verging toward that state of complete extinction which has long since overtaken their less fortunate neighbors and that period appears to be fast approaching when they will be known only in history. . . . Of between one hundred and fifty and two hundred who are claimed as members of that tribe, . . . only five or six are genuine untainted Narragansetts all the rest are either clear or nearly Negroes. . . . Forty years ago this was a nation of Indians now it is a medly [sic] of mongrels in which the African blood predominates.¹³

The federal government, too, saw imminent extinction as the consequence of the decline in Indian genuineness, a characteristic defined by what was termed purity of blood. Jedidiah Morse, commissioned by the secretary of war in 1820 to visit and report on the actual state of the Indian Tribes in our country, noted of the remnants of New England tribes that very few of them are of unmixed blood.¹⁴ In Rhode